The benefits of spending a day with the dead
As the traditions — especially the lush and gorgeous costumes and face paint — of Dia de los Muertos stretch into Halloween, concerns of cultural appropriation are inevitably aired. These concerns are valid and should be voiced, yet the extraordinary positive aspects of Dia de los Muertos are then cordoned off from many people who could benefit greatly from spending a day with the dead.
In her book Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon, Regina Marchi (2009) argues that Día de los Muertos, as it is celebrated in the United States, is an “invented tradition.” While noting that the phrase is often use pejoratively, Marchi says that Día de los Muertos offers “a historically marginalized population cultural resources with which to counter generations of disparagement from the larger society.” For Latinx generally and Mexican-Americans specifically, the holiday creates a visually alluring, festive, and spirited celebration that enables a positive cultural depiction and representation.
Día de los Muertos often functions more like a family reunion than a day of mourning. Families build altars at home and decorate graves at the cemetery, paying tribute and extending a welcome to their dearly departed. Several years ago, when the Día de los Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever Cemetery was smaller and more low key, I had the pleasure of spending the day watching, talking, and being moved by people who welcomed their loved ones back to visit. The thousands who visited Hollywood Forever did not have the existing personal relationships one finds in a community cemetery where residents and others who have moved away come together on Día de los Muertos to clean the graves of their loved ones, yet a feeling of warmth and personal connection develops as those who have built altars reminisce about their loved ones and share stories with strangers.
Like traditional Mexican and Mexican-American altars, those constructed at Hollywood Forever include candles, marigolds, incense (copal), skulls (Calaveras), and skeletons (Calacas). The sweet scent of marigolds and copal is said to attract the attention of the dead; the combined odor is also said to be similar to the odor of human bones. Photographs of the dead are typically included, as well as food offerings of pan de muertos (bread of the dead), candy, soda, and favorite foods to entice the dead by recalling the pleasures of living. The bright colors of flowers, blankets, garlands, papel picados (folded tissue paper cut into designs), and other decorative elements render the altars as welcoming and celebratory rather than mournful. The spirit of Día de los Muertos often tends to be whimsical and humorous, as there is no morbidity or fear of death in Mexican cultures that believe death is a part of life. This is not to say that there is no sense of mourning; rather that mourning can be bittersweet.
The Spanish word ofrenda is often used to refer to Día de los Muertos altar offerings because of its rich connotation. An artist in Mexico City, interviewed for the documentary La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1989) says, “The word ofrenda has a very special meaning in our Indian culture and in all cultures. The word ofrenda means love, and love has no price.” Love is an inherent aspect of building the altar and preparing for Día de los Muertos because it is time spent thinking about, talking about, and creating something for a loved one. Building an altar takes time, which becomes time-out-of-time in which one is engaged in the past, steeped in memory. This immersion is similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (2008) concept of flow, a state of optimal experience in which “concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time is distorted.” When the continuity of clock-time is temporarily suspended, the stories of the past saturate the present. For those who decide to build altars at Hollywood Forever, Día de los Muertos creates an opportunity to make space in daily life to stop and commemorate their loved ones. This opportunity is significant in a culture that largely feels more comfortable leaving the dead in the past.
The cemetery’s celebration is organized primarily from within the Latinx community. Members of the large Oaxacan community who live in the neighborhood surrounding Hollywood Forever participate as altarists and performer. Yet many of those who build altars and attend Día de los Muertos are non-Latinx who are adopting and adapting the practices of another culture for their own purposes. If those outside of the Latinx community embrace the idea that the dead still have an active presence in the everyday lives of the living, does their act of cultural appropriation do harm to the traditions of Día de los Muertos? In a multiethnic city like Los Angeles, where people from diverse cultures and nations are learning to live together, can celebrating Día de los Muertos create a common ground in which understanding across cultures can flourish?
The Día de los Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever is a performance of cultural memory; altars that commemorate various celebrities, artists, and loved ones keep these individuals, their histories, and their acts in circulation. Traditional Día de los Muertos celebrations similarly keep the ancestors alive for the family, but at Hollywood Forever the notion of community extends beyond family to include the consuming public who visit the cemetery for this event. As ideas about death are shifting in some parts of the United States, where celebrating a life well lived can accompany mourning the death of a loved one, the opportunity to spend a day making physical and psychical space for our collective dead not only honors the dead. It also heals the living.
